Local Facebook Ads: Setting a Radius Around a Restaurant

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Local Facebook ads let a restaurant owner draw a circle around a single address and reach only the people inside it. That circle is the first decision I make on any restaurant campaign, because it shapes every dollar that follows. A circle that is too wide spends the budget on people who will never make the trip, so the real work is matching it to the neighbourhood that actually eats with you.

Local Facebook ads: drawing a radius around a restaurant address

Facebook radius targeting draws a circle around your restaurant's address and shows Facebook ads only to people inside it. In Ads Manager, open the Locations field under your audience, drop the pin on your exact address, and pull the radius slider in or out until the circle covers the area you serve.

When I set up Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns for a restaurant in Greater Montréal, I usually start somewhere around three to five kilometres for an urban spot, then tighten or widen it after watching the first couple of weeks. The slider is only a starting point. A Plateau bistro that people walk to needs a much smaller circle than a Mascouche restaurant that people drive to, so the number that works for one address rarely fits the next.

Dine-in trade area: choosing a radius customers will actually travel

Your dine-in radius should match how far people will really travel for a table, not the tidy circle Facebook paints on the map. The slider does not know about traffic, one-way streets or parking, so it will happily include people who would never make the trip for a casual dinner. Picture the honest driving distance from your door and set the radius to match it.

Bridges and rivers: when the circle crosses into Laval or the South Shore

Bridges and rivers quietly break the circle. A radius drawn around a restaurant in Ahuntsic or on the North Shore drifts over the Rivière des Prairies into Laval, and one on the island can spill over the St. Lawrence into Longueuil, so you end up paying to reach people who face a bridge for a weeknight meal. I pull the radius back so it stops near the shoreline, or I exclude the postal codes on the far side of the crossing. Facebook draws circles, not polygons, so covering a real trade area sometimes means stacking two or three smaller pins that follow the bridges, highways and parking instead of one clean circle.

Delivery zone versus dine-in radius: two different distances

Delivery and dine-in are two different behaviours, so they belong in two ad sets with two different radii. Someone grabbing lunch nearby will not drive far, and someone ordering delivery is waiting on a driver, not planning an outing. Set the delivery radius to match the boundary you actually deliver to, and keep the dine-in radius a little wider, since people plan a dinner out differently than a quick order at home.

These are starting points I adjust per restaurant, not fixed rules:

Purpose	Radius to start from
Quick weekday lunch	around 3 km
Everyday dine-in	around 5 to 8 km
Delivery orders	your real delivery boundary
Weekend dinner trips	a little wider than everyday dine-in

Build each ad set around the behaviour it targets, then let real performance move the numbers.

Language, age range and meal-time scheduling inside the radius

Language, age range and meal-time scheduling let you tighten who sees the ad inside the radius you already drew. If your restaurant sits in a French-speaking neighbourhood, put your French and English versions in separate ad sets with the matching language targeting on each, so the right copy reaches the right diner and you can read the results cleanly instead of guessing which version carried the campaign.

Age range matters too. A family brunch spot and a late-night poutine counter are not chasing the same crowd, and the radius alone will not separate them. Meal-time scheduling adds the last layer: you can run the ads in the hours before lunch and dinner, when people are deciding where to eat. One catch to remember, though, is that scheduling by time of day only works when the ad set runs on a lifetime budget rather than a daily one, so choose that budget type if the meal-time windows matter to you.

Ad set structure for a single-location restaurant

Ad set structure for a single location works best as two or three separate ad sets rather than one catch-all. I usually split cold people inside the radius, people who have already visited the website, and the restaurant's existing page followers into their own ad sets. Keeping them apart lets me control the budget, creative and message for each group and see which one responds, instead of letting the system blend everyone together and hide what is actually working. It takes an extra twenty minutes to build, and it pays that back every time you optimize.

Budget per radius and placement choices for a local ad

Budget per radius should scale with the size of the circle: a tight radius needs less daily spend than a wide one, because there are simply fewer people to reach. Start each radius tier small enough to test without waste, then add spend to the tiers that earn it. A one-kilometre circle around a downtown lunch spot fills up fast on very little, while a wider suburban radius needs more to reach enough people without showing the same ad to the same person over and over.

For placements, I let Facebook use automatic placements so the budget spreads across the Facebook and Instagram feeds and the Audience Network on its own. For a small local restaurant, that usually stretches the spend further than hand-picking one placement, and you can always narrow it later once you see where results come from.

Radius-setup checklist for a restaurant owner

Radius setup comes down to a few checks before you spend anything.

1. Confirm the pin sits on your correct address, not a nearby intersection or a default map point Facebook suggested.
2. Check the radius against your real trade area: how far customers actually drive to dine in, and how far you actually deliver.
3. Match the daily budget to the radius size, since a wider circle needs more spend to reach a meaningful audience.

Once those three are set, preview the estimated audience size inside Ads Manager. If it reads too broad or too narrow, move the radius before you touch the ad creative. Revisit it every few months, because a trade area shifts as competitors open, streets change and traffic patterns move. For a related example, here is a similar Montréal restaurant project.